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Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

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Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#311

Post by BoiledCabbage »

orasis wrote: post #240
squarefoot wrote: post #234

One word: yes. https://www.hardwaretimes.com/gpu-mining-farm-w-over-4000-ge... https://hothardware.com/news/a-look-inside-a-massive-rtx-307... https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-shortages-worsen-crypt... And energy prices, of course. More demand = higher prices. Also keep in mind that cryptocurrencies become harder to mine with time, therefore the pursuit of more powerful hardware and more energy isn't going to st…

"therefore there's absolutely no way prices of hardware and energy will return to normal until governments won't stop this nonsense." It will stop once the crypto prices reach parity with the hardware investments plus or minus further speculation.

Can you be more specific here? I see no mechanism for this to happen. Difficulty will simply increase from that point.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#312

Post by BoiledCabbage »

roenxi wrote: post #297
jokethrowaway wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is not enough competition, people got conditioned to high prices for 10 years - once prices are raised they are not coming back. Good luck starting your GPU company

> Good luck starting your GPU company There is a chance you may mean that sarcastically, so... Yes, if you think sale prices are going to stay much higher than manufacturing costs it is a great time to start a new GPU factory. Mass produce 5-10 year old tech in bulk, soak up enough of the market to survive and move as quickly as possible into modern manufacturing techniques. We've seen in the last number of years tha…

> Yes, if you think sale prices are going to stay much higher than manufacturing costs it is a great time to start a new GPU factory.

So then as PoW difficulty increases, demand for GPS increases. Necessitating more factories until the primary output of world industry is GPU factories.

Does nobody see how absurd this is?

The market is stuck in a feedback loop. People are naievely looking at this and saying "Aha, just follow the rules of capitalism and the market and it will work out well. That's the religion." Not seeing this is a spiral. There is no market solution here.

It's like we're looking at a while loop, with condition "true == true", the body of the loop doubles the length of a string each time. Somewhere here is saying, this will not end well, we're gonna use up all of our heap trying to double the string size. And somebody else's solution is, "close some running programs so that ram can be allocated to the string doubling program".

Ok yah, we can run a bit longer, but the end result is still 70%+ of RAM being used to allocated these strings and eventually program crash.

Building more GPU factories isn't a solution is crypto's exponential consumption of resources.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#313

Post by rixed »

throwaway55421 wrote: post #298
squarefoot wrote: post #234

One word: yes. https://www.hardwaretimes.com/gpu-mining-farm-w-over-4000-ge... https://hothardware.com/news/a-look-inside-a-massive-rtx-307... https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-shortages-worsen-crypt... And energy prices, of course. More demand = higher prices. Also keep in mind that cryptocurrencies become harder to mine with time, therefore the pursuit of more powerful hardware and more energy isn't going to st…

But we do need more energy. Energy can fix essentially any problem we have. Need to desalinate water? Energy. Need to heat your Arctic home? Energy. Being able to use energy in crazy and inefficient ways is a feature, not a bug. Everything you ever do outside of subsistence level agriculture is proof of that. The ideal state of being would be one in which we have limitless fusion power or similar and we basically jus…

> we do need more energy

Sounds like ideology to me. I, for one, need many thing from basic food to nice music, but energy on its own in not in that list.

I wonder what people picture when they say "energy" but probably not that thing that is equivalent to movement and that is always a constant by definition (at least here and now), and that increase entropy when we manipulate it (entropy being that thing every life forms is designed to fight).

Anyway, carbon in the atmosphere may be a bigger problem than a fusion reactor in your garden, yet I'm a bit concerned by how much faster "we" could destroy our environment by producing more useless stuff if it became cheaper to do so.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#314

Post by rixed »

iqanq wrote: post #33

It's been years since the crypto boom - why hasn't production ramped up accordingly? Or are manufacturers waiting forever until it blows over? Because that may never happen.

Isn't the complexity of the hash challenge designed to match whatever production of computing gears in value?

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#316

Post by 15155 »

latchkey wrote: post #227
xwdv wrote: post #143

Some crypto miners are accumulating so much wealth that they are looking into building their own chips and hardware to mine even harder than what you can buy commercially from Nvidia.

Not for ETH. ethash is memory controller bound, not chip bound. This is why older generation GPUs are higher ROI than buying latest and greatest.

Why would Bitmain be releasing the Antminer E9 if it has no benefit over GPU?

Ethash is bounded by memory bandwidth, sure, which is why HBM-based ASICs and FPGAs will be better than non-HBM GPUs in almost every case for mining ETH.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#317

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

benreesman wrote: post #283
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they are. I ranted about this here a few weeks ago, but we're still getting intermittent rolling blackouts because of energy shortages caused by miners moving into the country (we have cheap electricity… for now at least).

As I mention above: I’ve got no special love for Ethereum miners. But why you’re trying to lay your municipality’s busted, corrupt-ass utility’s issues at their feet is perplexing. Ethereum miners at their worst are the maggots crawling around in your community’s failure to form a voting bloc to reform utilities. At best they provide an arbitrary demand for electricity that makes solar panels obvious. So I missed the…

After that "troll" bit I have no desire to engage with you. Have a look at the guidelines, old-timer.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#318

Post by squarefoot »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #277
itsoktocry wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> therefore there's absolutely no way prices of hardware and energy will return to normal until governments won't stop this nonsense. For all its faults, the market is great at solving these problems. Though I suppose it depends on what you mean by "normal".

The problem is that miners are buying GPUs. Without denying the problem, how can the market fix this?

> The problem is that miners are buying GPUs.

That's not a real problem, I can stop buying GPUs and keep playing most 3-5 years old games with a decent integrated one in a relatively modern CPU at a fraction of the price, and that's it. I'm not a gamer however, so I would understand hardcore gamers to be pissed off, but that's not a real problem as nothing vital is taken away from anyone.

The real problem is the steadily raising demand in energy which doesn't seem to stop anywhere in the future. If we accept the fact that more energy translates into more money, and that more money allows miners to add more and more GPUs (or ASIC dedicated hardware, energy-wise, a cluster of GPUs and a box that draws 3000 watts are exactly the same thing) then we're going straight to a future in which every resource will be used to produce energy.

How to stop something that screams "put more energy in = get more money out"?

No way, it's probably too late, and I expect a huge misinformation campaign from the parties involved, which already amassed a lot of money to pay for it. Therefore we'll see a stronger push for nuclear and other non clean sources, but also soaring prices of every other source, including clean ones, because the demand dictates the price, and there is where most demand is coming from.

And there's also the warming problem, because you know, consuming so much energy doesn't come without a price to pay.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#319

Post by squarefoot »

abraxas wrote: post #309
squarefoot wrote: post #234

One word: yes. https://www.hardwaretimes.com/gpu-mining-farm-w-over-4000-ge... https://hothardware.com/news/a-look-inside-a-massive-rtx-307... https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-shortages-worsen-crypt... And energy prices, of course. More demand = higher prices. Also keep in mind that cryptocurrencies become harder to mine with time, therefore the pursuit of more powerful hardware and more energy isn't going to st…

Crypto currency is an instantiation of Bostrom's paperclip maximizer running on a hybrid human/machine topology.

Yes, very likely, although there's no AI involved and are the humans who are digging their own grave. I can easily picture a future in which 50% of the space available on the planet is allocated for energy production plants, the other 50% for mining farms, and there will be essentially only jobs related to these two activities available, just like using every resource to make paperclips. We started something that could make a nice Twilight Zone plot, and that's what worries me the most.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#320

Post by pcthrowaway »

kingo55 wrote: post #272
ip26 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many years has etherium been putting off proof of stake now? Two? Three?

There are forks of Ethereum already running PoS consensus (e.g. Binance Smart Chain, Songbird and an upcoming fork called PulseChain to name a few). I hear the difficult part is getting the sharding to work.

BSC isn't strictly a fork of Ethereum, though it is EVM compatible and uses the geth protocol. It also uses the Tendermint consensus protocol from Cosmos, which is different from the PoS implementation being worked on by Ethereum.

Sharding is definitely proving to be challenging for Ethereum, but my understanding is that it's being worked on independently of the move to PoS now.

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